Sheva and The Prison
by rupertpupnick
Summary: Sheva does battle with hordes of infected zombies... of course!
1. Chapter 1

The voice of the helicopter pilot crackled over the radio link to Sheva's earpiece. Mumbaja One was inbound for assault team extraction, and orders were to assemble at the landing zone, and to kill as many enemies as possible along the way.

The mission location was code named "The Prison" in the briefings just before the assault. Sheva stood atop a platform at the apex of the hellish structure. Its interior spaces were grimy, foreboding, and rough hewn out of mountain stone punctuated by heavy iron doors and gratings that separated its various inner chambers. The view towards the outside was otherworldly. The Prison loomed above the crest of a remote mountain range shrouded in mist and ash. Some of the lower peaks in the distance leaked glowing, smoking streamers of lava. The terrain was impossible to negotiate even by foot with its unrelenting jagged slopes and intermittent and unpredictable natural hazards making it perfect for a maximum security facility: a helicopter was the only way in or out.

There hadn't been much trouble to this point, but Sheva unholstered her MP-45 machine pistol just the same. It was light and easy to move with, and considering the distance she had to cover to get to the landing zone, she was certain she'd have to put it to use before leaving.

No sooner had she rounded the first corner than she found herself facing a man who was stooping and swaying listlessly. For a moment it seemed that he would remain standing there, oblivious to Sheva's presence, but then suddenly the man looked up at her, and that was when Sheva felt a chill at the base of her spine.

It was his eyes.

Even at this distance-- 20 feet-- she should be able to see the whites of the man's eyes. Maybe the low light was playing tricks on Sheva's vision, but it seemed that the space between his eyelids was filled with indistinct reddish-brown smudges instead of normal human pupils.

He began to shout in an African language that Sheva didn't understand as he raised his arm, and pointed a crooked, bony, accusing finger directly at her, his voice rising and becoming shrill with contempt as he took a sudden sure-footed step in Sheva's direction.

The barrel of Sheva's weapon, resting comfortably at her hip, was already pointed at the man. She didn't hesitate, and squeezed off a string of five rounds from her submachine gun. They stitched an uneven line of red-dotted entry wounds that ran from just above his navel up to his right shoulder.

The man bent over sharply at the waist in pain, clutching the shattered bone socket that was once his right shoulder.

_What the hell, _Sheva thought to herself, _this guy should be DOWN._

But he wasn't going down. He was beginning to straighten himself up, slowly and stiffly.

Watching the man pull himself together after absorbing so many bullets should have alarmed her, but instead Shiva felt pissed-off, and she charged the man, closing the distance quickly, then leaping off the ground nimbly with her rear foot, she kicked and hit the man directly in the center of his chest at the sternum using her lead foot with practically all the force a woman of her height and weight could muster.

The man's mouth let out a foul gust of air as his rib cage collapsed from the blow that lifted him off his feet and slammed him into stone wall behind him. The air that huffed out of his mouth smelled like death. It wasn't the clean, formaldehyde saturated smell of death that permeates a morgue. This was the rotting, organic sort that festered in open fields beneath a blazing sun.

But how could a man like that seem to be alive, and then to attack?

Something was very wrong indeed.


	2. Chapter 2

As the harsh echoes of gunfire traveling up and down the stone hallway were dying down, Sheva began to notice a new, ominous undercurrent of sounds that seemed to come at her from all directions. It was the sound of awakening movement, shuffling feet, and sickly soft, muffled groans.

From a bare window-like opening in the corridor wall on her left, first a thin, rakish hand with a necrotic greenish cast appeared on the sill, and then a leg made its way over and down as another creature began to clamber its way through the opening. Moments later, as if from some unseen passage through the ceiling, a second zombie dropped down to the right, landing on all fours, and slowly beginning to straighten itself to stand up with considerable effort.

But Sheva could also hear that something was approaching her from behind, and instinctively judging that she had time before the zombies she could see in front of her could set upon her, she wheeled around to face the threat as yet unseen, pivoting neatly on one leather boot heel that spun almost without friction and the hard stone surface of the floor.

The thing was nearly upon her, its arms already raised in a menacing bid to grab her from behind. But Sheva was much faster, her MP-45 was leveled from her hip, already in position, as if it were an extension of her own body. The string of bullets found their intended mark at the creature's center of mass, stopping it neatly in its tracks without causing it to spin or turn, but making it vibrate a violent staccato in time with the clatter of the MP-45 full auto feed mechanism before collapsing straight down in a heap.

Sheva spun back towards the first two zombies as soon as she had released the trigger, but also into the waiting grasp of one of the monsters who had apparently closed the distance with unexpected speed, one of each of its claw-like hands hooking painfully into Sheva's shoulders. Reacting with fear instead of training, she countered by seizing its forearms, leaving the MP-45 to fall and hang uselessly from its shoulder strap.

The creature had a significant height advantage, and was using it as leverage in spine-bending attempt to force her to the floor. As Sheva took half a step back to brace herself in order to push back, she noticed that the creature's eyes were widening as its neck began to bulge. Something suddenly erupted from the creatures mouth in a thick spray of mucus and saliva tinted pink with blood. It was some sort of an appendage, but certainly not a human one, and, in fact, not like anything she'd seen before. It had a shape that reminded her of a banana peel, with four long petals that each came to a point. But there, the similarity ended. These petals had razor sharp talons and serrated edges. They were a pale organic pink, like some hideous alien meatflower, and they surged and probed through the air as if trying to find her and seize her for some malicious purpose.

The horrifying sight electrified every muscle in her body. Adrenaline surged from out of her chest and into her arms which extended with surprising force, causing the monster to release its grasp and stagger backwards before pausing to retract its hostile looking oral appendage with a sickening slurp. Sheva never her took her eyes off her assailant even for a moment. Her two hands, now free, made a blind search for the dangling MP-45, and with the second zombie leaning in to make its own grab, Sheva's left finger slipped into the trigger guard, squeezed a bit prematurely, and caused the weapon let loose a long arc of urgent and undisciplined automatic fire, as she raised up the barrel, her right hand cupped underneath, to take better aim.

The first two rounds tore ragged, splintered holes in the nearby window sill. The next rounds crashed into the nearer monster's hip and then kidney on the opposite side, decisively halting its forward progress. Following rounds hissed harmlessly between the two undead figures, their torsos and limbs at odd angles as they attempted to regain their limited capacity for balance in the wake of Sheva's counterattack.

Then the last bullet, a "golden BB" as the range instructors referred to a bullseye round, hit the last creature somewhere in the head, but Sheva could not tell exactly where because its cranium had disappeared into a cloud of dark red mist that spread out explosively in all directions before quickly disappearing. The headless ghoul took a seemingly normal step forward as if its head were only a needless accessory, then halted, teetered, and fell stiffly over to one side like a stricken support tower.

As if by reflex, Sheva twisted her shoulders sharply to the left, her slender hips and torso following as she raised up her right knee, the balls of her left foot pressing against the leather sole of her boot into the stone floor, spinning at first away from the last monster, but gathering speed, and then coming back around, her right foot fully extended now as it collided with the side of the fiend's head with a sharp snapping crack. The zombie cartwheeled across to Sheva's left from the force of the blow, limbs splayed out in all directions as it did a flat sideways spin into a small pile of empty, rusty steel drums with a hollow crash, finally dying for the second and last time.

Since encountering the first zombie Sheva hadn't even taken one step toward the landing zone. And then there were more. Three more. Now five. A stand up fight in this place could only end her demise. Sheva broke into sprint down the corridor, the click-clack of her hardened leather boot soles piercing the gathering deathly chorus of moaning and shuffling zombies headed in her direction.


	3. Chapter 3

Sheva's retreat took her down the longest of the corridors she had been fighting in, and she could see from the change in lighting in the distance that the end of the hallway opened up to some sort of exterior space outside of the building. Her MP-45 felt too light in her hands as she jogged down the hallway, warning her that its magazine was nearly empty. In the unrelenting haste of her recent engagements, she had had no opportunity to reload. But as the sounds of her pursuers faded in the distance behind her, she judged that she now had the time to fill her weapon with ammo once more.

Reaching for a replacement clip on her belt, she decelerated quickly, shuffling through a half-step before coming to a complete halt. She lifted her weapon up from her waist, and rotated it until it was nearly upside down, exposing the feedslot on the bottom of the grip that had moments before ejected the old clip. In one smooth motion, her left hand guided the new fresh clip into place, and then slapped it all the way in with heel of her hand, the faint scent of gun oil wafting briefly into her nostrils. The movement may have looked fluid and easy, but Sheva felt tension building inside her with each passing moment. She was always uncomfortable with the idea of standing still for any reason during a firefight, but she'd heard too many stories from the field that underscored the importance of this crucial stand-still-during-reload rule of her training, and though she'd never heard it, she knew that there was only one sound worse than than the loud hollow snap of a hammer falling on an empty chamber, and that was dull metallic thud of a jammed cartridge caused by an improperly loaded weapon. It was a sound that drained the blood out of your face in a heartbeat, because it meant the weapon would be useless until fully disassembled and unjammed.

Sheva ran for the daylight she saw in front of her, but the nearer she came to it, the dimmer and grayer it seemed to become.

When she finally arrived out in the open, she found herself atop a large outdoor deck-like structure that was crudely constructed from differently sized wooden planks, none of which were properly lined up or flush with any of the others. It looked like a large scale version of something built from the toy construction set of a poor crazed child. Every joint was crooked or warped slightly, with not a flat surface or long straight line to be seen.

But this was no time to be playing building inspector. The group she had left in her wake was still after her, and on the other side of the haphazard decking, a new group could be seen just taking notice of her for the first time. Some carried long staves in both hands. One carried a large pipe wrench, while another actually paused to light a rag-stuffed bottle it had pulled from a pocket in its rotting, ill-fitting clothing.

Sheva reached back over her shoulder as she turned to face the pursuing first group once more, grabbed the barrel of the rifle slung behind her back, and pulled its stock over and into her other hand.

She quickly glanced towards the second group, and judging that she had space and time, raised the rifle stock to her shoulder and nestled its side into her cheekbone as she pointed the weapon back down the stone corridor she had just escaped from.

This was easy. The enemy targets were all conveniently grouped by the hallway into a narrow field of view that fell almost entirely into the viewfinder. She calmed her breathing and let the red aiming bead drift across the heads, chests and shoulders of the shambling undead asshe squeezed the trigger. _Pop! _One fiend went straight back, taking down two more following along behind. _Pop! Pop! _They fell away, each with a single shot, and sometimes the same bullet would rip through two to equally lethal effect.

The first group having been eliminated, Sheva turned her attention back toward the second. It was then that she noticed him rounding the corner of the outside of the building at the other end deck for the first time: a very large hulking figure whose head was completely covered in some kind of red sackcloth. She could see that he was taller that any of the other zombies in the area, but it was difficult to judge how much larger, as he was further behind the main group. But he was closing the distance quickly.

Shooting a quick glance back down the corridor to make sure than no one on that flank was getting up again, she reloaded the rifle and brought it to bear down the new sightline. Now he was in the middle of the group, leaning back while seeming to spin in place violently. The creatures around him that once had seemed a deadly threat to her, now suddenly looked like sad little rag dolls as they were abruptly launched into the air up and away from this hooded human spindle, some of them in pieces that were broken apart from their torsos at the joint and sockets.

And even more quickly than the crowd of zombies had come together, it had been utterly dispersed, leaving only the faceless giant where the rotting and moaning throng had surrounded him only moments before.

The rifle felt suddenly heavy in Sheva's grasp, the barrel drooping down and away as she blinked twice incredulously, as if it would clear her vision, because she could not believe what she was seeing. This dude had to be at least ten feet tall, and in both hands he was dragging along behind him an ax whose handle was probably a few feet longer, and whose head was as twice as large as the one on his broad and naked shoulders, trailing sparks and faint wisps of smoke as it was dragged along on the ground abehind. The hood had made him at first seem some sort of executioner, but now with no obstacles to her line of sight, Sheva could see that he was also wearing some sort of heavy black apron that was freshly spattered with the blood and half decomposed entrails of the zombies that had surrounded him earlier, making him appear like some sort of butcher of ghouls.

The monster took strides that were long and swift, and it moved towards Sheva with alarming, sure-footed rapidity. Sheva suddenly felt as if as there were barely enough time and space to even raise up her rifle once more, so she turned and fled down back the corridor she came from, cursing and muttering to herself that she surely wasn't getting any closer to the landing zone by heading in this direction.

At the far end of the hall she spied something of hopeful tactical value: a window-sized opening in the wall that led into a different room. Sheva slung the rifle over her back once more, freeing her hands which she placed on the sill, and then vaulted through the window into a sideways shoulder roll on the ground whose momentum carried her back up onto her feet with her rifle facing back through the opening she'd just come through. She aimed her weapon and fired.

It would have been a gross understatement to say that the monster was shrugging off the rifle shots. The hulking brute didn't even flinch once, although Sheva could see clearly through the scope that each round was penetrating the beast with an substantial eruption of blood. With still a few yards to go before the axman was at the window, Sheva moved the aiming point to the middle of the hood, hoping to pierce the soft tissue of an eyeball or oral or nasal cavity, but each shot seemed just as ineffectual as the ones before it. The monster didn't even seem as if it were going to slow down as it approached the other side of the opening.

Rather, without any apparent hesitation, the executioner stooped, and then with its long legs simply stepped through the window, the length of its legs allowing it to clear the sill easily, and pausing only briefly to thread the ax that was trailing behind him through the opening.

The creature's scarred and distended abdomen became suddenly taut with exertion, and instinctively Sheva knew that an ax stroke was to follow in an instant. She stepped both to the side of and towards the monster, knowing that if her opponent kept both hands on that long ax handle, she would be much safer fighting on the inside.

The ax stroke came nowhere near Sheva, landing instead on the stone floor to her left with a deafening crash that instantly filled the air with an enormous cloud of dust and sparks of made hot iron and stone chips that stung the exposed flesh of her face, shoulder and arm on the left side of her body.

The executioner paused momentarily, leaning forward, some of its weight supported by the ax that was still being grasped by both hands. Sheva was close enough to him now to smell the sweat, blood, soot, and decaying tissue that was caked onto his titanic frame, and as the unwelcome odors creeped into her nasal passages, her throat began to close and choke with nausea, but only for a second before a new surge of adrenaline suffused her body once more.

Before the stooping giant could lift its ax from the floor, Sheva struck the nearer of its legs with her heel just behind its knee, causing to it sink even lower to the floor, its head hanging down further still, revealing to Sheva that the hood it was wearing was secured with thick tapered wooden splinters that pierced through and into the monster's head from all sides and directions.

She held her rifle high above her head, the barrel pointed upwards, her muscles stretched out all along her lean, lithe tension-filled body, but a body too soaked with adrenaline and fear to sense the sickness lurking inside of her gut.

Sheva brought the butt of rifle down on the top of its head with all of her might. Its sturdy wooden stock landed with a wet, muffled crunch, and a stinging heat flared up in the palms of her hands, skinned as the rifle slid upwards within her grasp from the force of the blow.

It was dead, a heavy mass of limbs slumping further down but held together by muscle and tendon suddenly gone limp, as if someone had thrown off the creature's main circuit breaker.

Sheva ran for the landing zone.


End file.
